Newsday WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2001 LIFESTYLES FOOD WEDNESDAY Bubble Tea B14 Part2 A Cafe That Celebrates the Mind, B3 TThehe NNaturalistaturalist WhenWhen Dennis Dennis PulestonPuleston died died last last weekweek at at 95, 95, the the world world lostlost a a passionate passionate protectorprotector of of thethe woodlands, woodlands, thethe marshes, marshes, the the HW riversrivers and and all all of of nature’snature’s creatures creatures B6-7 1997 Photo by Jessica Brandi Lifland B6 A Part 2 an Mof the Natural World BirdswereDennisPuleston’sparticularjoy.Butallthatnature offeredwasinhiscareduringthe95yearsofhisadventurouslife. “And on the shore the wild doves mourn in the evening and then there comes a pang, some kind of emotional jar, and a longing. And if one followed his whispering impulse he would walk away slowly into the thorny bush following the call of the doves.” — John Steinbeck, “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” LL HIS LIFE, Dennis Puleston heard the doves — the doleful call that signals spring. No won- der his family picked this quote from Steinbeck for his memorial card. The doves called to him of rebirth and the earth’s awaken- ing. Of green places and wild things. And oh how they sang. I wish they would sing to me that way. I write about gardens and nature — about the living things that grow in the earth and rustle in the Awoods. But I have never heard what Dennis heard and when he died a little more than a week ago, I could only think what a loss it is for all of us who treasure this island we live upon. Who see the horse- shoe crabs mating on the spring tides and contem- plate ants and ospreys and search for wild orchids in the marshes and listen for the mourning doves. The doves of Dennis Puleston’s heart were not al- ways doves, of course. Sometimes they were yellow- billed cuckoos and scarlet tanagers and wood thrushes and rufous-sided towhees. And the ospreys that he At 25, Dennis Puleston embarked on a six-year helped bring back from the brink of extinction to the around-the-world voyage. Above, circa 1933, he’s at the Paumonok he loved as perhaps no walker of the wheel of the Marit, sailing from Newfoundland. woods and voyager of the bays and rivers has since Walt Whitman. Throughout the days and nights of his 95 years — some of them spent in howling ocean storms and Island in the New Hebrides. He was tattooed with a steaming jungles and frozen ice fields — the doves shark’s tooth by Samoans. He visited Antarctica 38 Three watercolor paintings by Puleston, who was the first that called to Dennis Puleston times — mostly in his later years as a cruise-ship nat- chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund: from top, took so many shapes. A golden- uralist, a job he took after he retired as director of an osprey, white-winged crossbills, and common loons headed quetzal showing off its technical information at Brookhaven National Labo- shimmering iridescent plumage ratory. He voyaged to the North Pole on a nuclear- in the Venezuelan cloud forest. powered Soviet icebreaker, and when he reached the Puffins swarming in the air like Transpolar Bridge, he drank a glass of champagne gigantic bumblebees on a deso- and took a quick swim that he called “the polar ways and crowded towns and beaches,” he once late island off the coast of Nor- plunge.” wrote. “There are still cool woodlands, quiet rivers, way. Chinstrap penguins mat- As a naval architect with the wartime Office of Sci- salt marshes, overgrown meadows, and rolling sand ing in the shadow of a volcanic entific Research and Development, Dennis helped de- dunes to be enjoyed by those who have the eyes to crater spewing smoke and ash velop the DUKW amphibious landing craft that seek and the desire to learn about the other Long in the South Sandwich Islands. brought troops ashore in World War II. He trained Island.” 1 Irene A wandering albatross soaring the servicemen who operated the 2 /2-ton vehicles Dennis’ book “A Nature Journal” is a bible of this Virag in the wake of his ship as he and was wounded by shrapnel in Burma and re- other Long Island. But he did more than teach us cruised the Southern Ocean. ceived the Medal of Freedom. He was in the dunes at about our natural world — he was a pioneer and a From the day he stared at the Normandy catching his breath and listening to the conscience in the fight to preserve it. He was the black-speckled blue eggs of a sounds of battle around him when he heard a sky- first chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund, song thrush’s nest as a 3-year-old in his native En- lark singing. “I was deeply moved by this one ele- which started on Long Island in 1967 and sued the gland and fell in love with birds to the final months ment of sanity in the whole mad business of war,” he Suffolk County Mosquito Control Commission to of his long life, Dennis was always plunging into would write years later. “That bird made me realize stop spraying DDT in local marshes. That led to a thorny bushes and looking at far horizons both real that someday all this would be over and I could enjoy statewide and then a nationwide ban of the deadly and remembered. birds again the way I had always wanted to.” pesticide. It all started with Dennis’ observations of When he was 25, he embarked on a six-year round- He came back to his adopted land of Long Island how DDT was affecting ospreys on Gardiners Island. the-world voyage in a 31-foot yawl. He sailed the to enjoy them. No matter where he adventured, Den- He had never seen an osprey until he came to Long South Seas with a 4-foot boa constrictor named Eg- nis always came back to Long Island. He came back Island and he didn’t want to lose them. bert coiled around his waist at the steering wheel. with his battered Bausch and Lomb binoculars and a He also persuaded his friends Maurice and Cecile NEWSDAY, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20,He 2001 dined with cannibals on the island of Ndeni and poetic sensibility that never grew old. “Long Island Wertheim to give their hunting preserve on the Car- was kidnapped by armed natives on Espiritu Santa is so much more than shopping malls, concrete high- mans River in Shirley to the federal government as a B7 Part 2 Newsday Photo / Thomas A. Ferrara Puleston’s wife, Betty, right, with their daughters, Sally McIntosh, left, and Jennifer Clement, at their home in Brookhaven hamlet. We were talking on the phone and I could hear Steve Englebright crying. HE ENVIRONMENTALISTS who knew Dennis Puleston admire his oneness with nature. John Turner, a naturalist and director of conser- vation programs for The Nature Conservancy, recalls the first time he met Dennis. “I was a young birder in my late teens. I saw him as I was walking into his most trea- sured place, Warbler Woods. ‘What did you see?’ I asked. He stopped and talked to me, just small talk, but I couldn’t believe I was talking to Dennis TPuleston. Years later, I was at a meeting — it was one of the first planning sessions of the Pine Barrens task force — and I looked over at Dennis. He was sketching an American kestrel. It was beautiful, perfectly proportioned, and he was drawing it from Puleston tours Wertheim Woods, circa 1955, with daughter Sally and son Peter. Puleston persuaded the Wertheim memory.” family to donate land near Carmans River in Shirley to the U.S. government as a wildlife refuge. Art Cooley, another founding member of the Envi- ronmental Defense Fund, was a fledgling teacher when he met Dennis 55 years ago. “We went on a wildlife refuge. And he convinced his own mother-in- and an Acadian flycatcher and the redder-than-a-car- birding trip and Dennis said, ‘Next time, bring along law to give part of the family acreage to further pro- dinal flash of a scarlet tanager in the treetops, but I some of your students.’ That started 20 years of field tect the river. Dennis and his wife, Betty, and their knew that nothing would have bothered Dennis and trips. Dennis was a natural teacher. Just three weeks ago, I heard him teaching his nurse how to four children lived in a white cottage on the banks of that he would have seen and heard volumes more. identify the yellow finches and grackles and house the Carmans. He painted the ospreys that nested on “I’d meet him on the trail during spring migration, sparrows in the backyard.” a platform in the marsh not far from the house and and he’d be so excited,” Marilyn told me. “He’d talk A nurse was helping Dennis when I visited him a took in a menagerie of creatures that ranged from a about an experience he had four or five years ago. It year ago. He said he’d been slowed down by heart turkey vulture to a pregnant turtle. was fall and he was canoeing on the Carmans River surgery. His hearing was failing, but he got on an ex- when a huge flock of tree swallows — thousands of He was a writer and a painter and a botanist and ercise bike every day and he still turned out the faith- an ornithologist.